1. Field
The disclosure relates to a method, apparatus, system, and article of manufacture for interfacing a device.
2. Background
A device driver is a program that controls a hardware device, such as, a printer, a disk drive, a keyboard, a network adapter, etc. The device driver may act as a translator between the hardware device and programs that use the hardware device. A hardware device may have a set of specialized commands that can be accessed by the device driver corresponding to the hardware device, where the specialized commands may exploit features of the hardware device. However, programs may access the hardware device by using generic commands that are independent of the hardware device. The device driver, corresponding to the hardware device, may accept the generic commands from the programs and then translate the generic commands into specialized commands for the hardware device.
Hardware devices that are coupled to a computational platform may use device drivers to operate compatibly with the computational platform. For example, a network adapter that is coupled to a personal computer may use a network adapter device driver to operate compatibly with the personal computer. If no device driver corresponding to a hardware device is available on a computational platform, then the hardware device may not operate when the hardware device is coupled to the computational platform.
The device driver corresponding to a hardware device may be distributed with the hardware device or downloaded from a network, such as, the Internet. The device driver corresponding to a hardware device may also be distributed with operating system installs. If a new revision of the hardware device becomes available, then a new device driver corresponding to the new revision of the hardware device may have to be installed in the computational platform. Installing the new device driver may allow the new revision of the hardware device to operate compatibly with the computational platform.